Remarketing: How to Make Your Content Marketing and SEO up to 7x More&nbspAwesome

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Today, I'll share with you a case study on how we used remarketing to make our content marketing and SEO efforts up to seven times more effective. In the last two years, we've moved beyond just doing SEO to kicking some major online marketing butt and I'd love to show you the lessons we've learned in the time it took to get here. Hopefully you can cut your own learning curve and get right to it!

Rockin' SEO and the company no one knows

WordStream's website launched late in 2008. My company is pretty much your typical B2B brand using content marketing and SEO to drive leads for the business. Today, our blog gets around half a million visitors each month; we've seen a compound monthly growth rate of 8.4% every month, for the last five years!

Here's what that looks like:

At first glance, you might consider this a huge SEO success (doesn't everything look better if you only take a glance?). As you might expect though, we've faced a few challenges over the last few years:

Issue 1: Low visitor engagement

Here's what it looked like over a 60-day period last year, back when we had pretty weak user engagement metrics:

Just 1.9 pages per visit.

An average visit duration of 1 minute and 34 seconds.

A new visitor ratio of 79.2%.

We knew we could do better than this… yet we weren't.

Issue 2: Low conversion rate

Our second challenge had to do with low conversion rates from website visitors to offer sign-ups. Like many other companies that do SEO/Content Marketing, we're hoping to turn some of that traffic into offer sign-ups for things like white papers or free trials. We want to get interested prospects into our system so we can communicate with (and market to) them on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, our conversion rates were pretty low--just under 2%--as people were bouncing away and often not returning. I don't care how great you are at getting eyes on your content; if you're not converting, it's worthless.

Issue 3: Virtually no branded searches

This one was probably our biggest problem. In organic search, only 3% or so of our approximately half a million monthly organic searches were branded searches. Check out this snapshot from last year, back when "not provided" was only around 10% and it was still possible to do this kind of analysis.

I'm sure we've all seen our share of clueless clients, where 95% of the organic search traffic is branded search. I wouldn't want to see all branded search; it means your SEO sucks if you're only appearing in front of people who are already looking for your business by name.

My site was the exact opposite. We were driving hundreds of thousands of visits per month via SEO and only 3% of that came from branded search. What does that mean? It meant our SEO had gotten too far ahead of the brand.

On the one hand, it's great to have growing SEO traffic numbers. However, as I pondered the issues above—low engagement, low conversion and very little branded search—I realized the situation was more like:

Essentially, we were just driving tons of traffic to my link-juiced up domain using the amazing, optimized content we'd created, but people wouldn't stay that long, convert, or remember the company brand.

That's not a good thing at all. It's pretty anti-climactic, actually; you do the work of creating killer content, optimizing it for both users and search, get it out the door and in front of the right people… and they still have no idea who you are. We had to stop throwing money out the door. We couldn't just be SEOs anymore.

Remarketing primer for the uninitiated

Remarketing is basically the process of tagging people who visit your site, then targeting them with banner ads after they leave your site. No, this is not otherwise known as stalking—not if you're doing it right, anyway. Remarketing can be a very powerful tool, if you avoid crossing over into the creep factor.

It gives you the opportunity to appear in front of people who had already expressed an interest in your brand as they go about their business on the web. They could be checking their email, reading the news, watching a YouTube video… and there you are! Reminding them of that thing they were going to do when they checked you out a few days ago.

Why remarketing?

We did a lot of thinking about our issues and how to fix them. We were totally killing it with our SEO and driving traffic like no one's business, but clearly, that wasn't enough.

Remarketing was actually one of the first potential solutions I considered seriously, because by definition, remarketing provides opportunity to:

Turn abandoners/bouncers into leads

Increase brand recall (and thus increase branded searches)

Increase repeat visitor rates and engagement

Increase the effectiveness of SEO and content marketing

What we needed was to better connect with the people who were interested in visiting us in the first place. Obviously, we weren't excelling at grabbing and keeping their attention, but then, we weren't getting the chance to follow up with this mass of search traffic.

Remarketing would allow us a second chance to make that first impression, if you will (and even a third, and a fourth). We had to get past being forgettable. We had to get sticky.

And why remarket with Google, you ask? Why not? Quite simply, they were the largest and most recognized marketplace going; they just made sense for us. The Google Display Network is one of the largest remarketing networks in the world, with over two million sites in the network. It also includes AdMob for mobile targeting, meaning you can get your ads to show up in Angry Birds and other mobile apps.

Generally you can find your tagged site visitors on the network many times per day, several days per week, and across many different sites. On average, you'll be able to connect with:

According to research from Forrester, 96% of people who visit your site don't convert to a lead or sale. And 70% of people who put stuff in a shopping cart leave without placing an order. These people really are the low hanging fruit and from that perspective, I view remarketing as an effective conversion rate optimization tool—sort of.

This was another major reason retargeting made sense for us. We really needed that help with brand recognition and getting people back to our site to convert (or at least get back on site and connect so we could nurture the lead).

So, with the decision made to at least try it out and test, we got started.

Important things to consider when starting remarketing

In remarketing, you usually need to create different audiences to remarket so you can adjust your bidding strategy and your ads. For example, we created one audience for people who visited our blog, one for home page visitors and another for people who visited one of our free tools (e.g.: Our Google AdWords Grader for PPC auditing). We can assume each of these high-level groups was looking for different types of information.

This basic segmenting allowed us to show different ads, depending on which section of our site they visited.

A secondary benefit was that we could bid more aggressively (get more impressions, higher more prominent ad positions) for visitors to our AdWords Grader, which is worth way more to us as a business than someone who visits our blog (because we blog about all sorts of random stuff that has nothing to do with WordStream there, intent is far lower, if at all).

Another cool remarketing strategy for content marketers is to define audience categories based on the different post categories in your blog. If you already have a ton of blog content that is classified by topic, leverage those existing classifications in your remarketing audience definition strategy.

Also, consider membership duration; that is, how long do you want to keep chasing these people around the Internet? I set ours to 30-60 days, which is pretty aggressive (you might even call it spammy). A shorter membership duration would improve cost per conversion metrics, since people are less likely to convert as more time passes. Also, consider the difference you might see between B2C and B2B. You know the length of your average sales cycle and will have to test to see if it's worth going beyond that time, or if they're apt to have completed a purchase.

Remember:

Create audiences, groups of visitors based on the pages they visited or other factors.

Bid more aggressively on visitors who showed greater intent.

Segment your audiences based on the different content topics on your site

Test against the length of your sales cycle as a starting point to finding the right audience membership duration.

Killer ad creative strategy for remarketers

Now that we've tagged visitors and segmented them into different audiences, the key is to create cool ads in different formats that:

Drive a call to action.

Feature branding or images that will improve brand recall.

Lousy ads have sunken many remarketing efforts, so the key is to keep A/B testing with different ad designs. You want to have a high CTR (ideally more than 0.4%) and find the most memorable copy and image combinations, since one of the objectives here is to improve brand recall. You know you have finally "made it" when you get people tweeting your ads! Like this cute little puppy dog!

Another company killing it with their remarketing ads right now is none other than Moz, who has some of the cutest remarketing ads featuring the amazing Roger Mozbot!

Remarketing results 18 months out

We started our remarketing efforts early in Q1 2012, just over 18 months ago. How are things going today? Based on the title of the post, you know this was the best move we could have made, but how big was the impact?

Impact on brand recall

One of the biggest issues I had was poor brand recall - that a measly 3% of my organic searches were branded searches. Unfortunately, the whole keyword (not provided) mess makes it pretty much impossible to trend this branded searches over time [shakes fist at Google], however a proxy for brand recall is direct traffic. Meaning, to the extent that you're building your brand, you would expect more people to visit your website directly, as opposed to stumbling upon your SEO'ed content. Here's what my direct traffic looks like over last 6 years.

Impact on repeat visitor rate

Earlier, I mentioned that last January, we had a 20% returning visit rate. Today, it's more like a 33% of our visitors are repeat visitors. That's a massive over 50% improvement. We love to see the steady increase in repeat visitors (decrease in new visitors) over time.

Impact on user engagement and conversion rates

Check THIS out. Remember that ridiculous 1 minute and 33 second average visit duration? Today, it's up 300% and is approaching 5 minutes. Furthermore, our website visitor-to-lead-form-submitted conversion rates are up 51%!

It's important to note there was one other major factor that helped us here with the huge increase in visit duration and that was to embrace longer form content. Both were important for the overall strategy and I'll write about that in a future post.

Repeat visitors +50%, conversion rate +51%, and and time on site +300% = 7x more awesome!

A few closing notes on our remarketing strategy:

Basically, we buy a truckload of impressions ever month. Around 44 Million of them per month—take a look below—I allocate my PPC budget 50/50 between search and display remarketing.

Why so much remarketing? At this point, we're already generating hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site every month via SEO and content marketing, so it's worth that much more to the business to convert the organic traffic we're getting. I think this is very common among sites that do SEO well.

As we've gotten better and better at driving traffic via SEO, our PPC search strategy today is much more about getting additional ad space coverage around a very narrow set of high commercial intent keywords, which have lots of ads crowding out the organic results.

It's important to note that my "7x More Awesome" metric was our ROI from remarketing as we specifically sought to improve engagement rates, brand recall and conversion rates - if you choose to test remarketing for your business, the ROI will depend on your goals and objectives.

Remarketing: moving beyond SEO towards building your brand

In summary, SEO is a great traffic acquisition method, but by definition, you're going after people who are unfamiliar with your brand (since if they knew where to get whatever they were looking for, they would have directly navigated to your site).

In order to grow your business into a more mature company, you need to go beyond just SEO and build your brand!

Remarketing is an incredibly effective way to leverage and capitalize on your SEO and content marketing investments to build:

more repeat visitors,

more brand recall (branded searches, direct traffic),

more engagement (pageviews per visit, time on site, lower bounce rates)

and more conversions/leads/sales.

Personally, I think it's crazy to be doing SEO without at least some remarketing. No, it's not free, but neither is SEO/Content Marketing. The point is to understand where each tactic is most effective and how they work best together to drive audiences, then convert/retain to get way more bang for your buck. Like Rand has said, we can't just be SEOs anymore!

About larry.kim —

Larry the CEO of MobileMonkey, Inc. a popular Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform used by millions of users. He's also the Founder & CTO of WordStream, the World's leading provider of PPC marketing software, including the AdWords Grader and the 20 Minute PPC Work Week. The company employs approximately 300 people and manages a Billion dollars of Ad Spend for tens of thousands of companies, and was acquired by Gannett for $150M in July, 2018

Just throwing out a question to get a discussion started. I should have included this in the conclusion.

Content Marketers! Are you using remarketing to market your content? Why or why not? Have you tried it? if so, what were the results?

What is your allocation of budget towards producing content (eg: salaries of bloggers and people involved with content creation) vs. the marketing of those content assets that you produce (eg: salaries or ad spend associated with people and programs involved with driving press pick ups or eyeballs, etc. to your content) as a percentage. (eg: 50/50 or whatever).

1. I have used re-marketing recently, but just joined a new company and will be using this post as part of my recommendation (thanks!)

2. My budget allocation is currently heavier on the content creation side specially when I include multi-media type content production -- maybe 65/35. But I hope to move that closer to 50/50 or even weighted towards the marketing side a bit more.

Bottom line is our site could look rad full of content, but if there aren't enough eyeballs, etc.. it's not sustainable.

Thanks for the great read, your success with re-marketing is now among my new goals.

1. That's great! Glad you found it to be helpful. Was working on this for 2 years now so this was straight from the heart.

2. We're not too far off from you. Today, we spend slightly more on marketing content vs. creating content. Where i think the ratio is a bit off is where you see companies that spend all on creating content and nothing on marketing it.

Great article here Larry. Been doing some remarketing (lead gen) for months now on site visitors coming from organic traffic. The site I'm managing is actually doing both SEO and PPC, so I need to segment my traffic sources. With the help of Google Analytics in building the remarketing list, I was able to build very targeted ones like people who visited a certain page who came from an organic search. The conversion rate? I would say it's good for a campaign running on the Google's Display Network, running at 19% in 5 months since the campaign has gone live.

Jun, thanks for sharing your story and congrats on that conversion rate! it's must higher than what i typically see, so you must be doing a great job with list segmentation and ad creative, etc. Congrats on your success! i believe that remarketing is low hanging fruit that everyone should be going after!

Yes Larry segmentation played a very important role in the higher conversion rate. If you can segment visitors coming from an organic search who viewed your product/service page or your FAQ, you've got a curious visitor. Crafting a good remarketing message then seals the deal.

After reading this post I am going to start re marketing, and start doing the content marketing to achieve the best results. However do you have any idea what is a good budget to start the re marketing of the business?

Great post about Remarketing Larry. You always put good insights and thought into a lot of your content. I would guess you get a lot more branded searches these days, as many people I know are familiar with Wordstream. Do you recommend any other strategies to help promote your content on top of remarketing? I am thinking of taking it one step further with different posts and I was wondering what other strategies have helped you. I am debating using StumbleUpon's paid feature to also drive traffic to posts and also promoting some of the posts on Linkedin as well. Just let me know if you have had luck in any other channels or how you feel they compare to remarketing for content. I have also utilized content aggregators such bizsugar, inbound.org, technorati, alltop and scoop.it which have helped to continue to promote high quality blog posts.

my personal experiences with stumbleupon paid promotion features were that we were getting a ton of traffic, for relatively cheap, but that it had poor engagement metrics (like 25 seconds average time on site - they were just flipping through, average of 1.01 page views per session, very high bounce rate, etc - though it was pretty cheap). However i haven't done this for clients, only my own website so this is a sample size of 1 advertiser here, so if you're having success with it, i'd believe it.

Remarketing is kind of a nice catch-all campaign to run since you can tag visitors from all sources (stumbleupon, seo, adwords, linkedin, content aggregators, etc.) and try to make those casual visitors into loyal repeat visitors.

Hi Ben! The second biggest ad network out there in terms of reach is Facebook.

There are hundreds of smaller ad networks that offer similar remarketing things (often referred to as retargeting), but Google and Facebook would be the obvious choices for someone getting started with remarketing.

1) Yes! Remarketing isn't free - (but neither is any marketing in my opinion). The budget for remarketing will definitely be proportional to the sizes of your audiences. But there are other factors that come into play, including, how aggressively do you engage in remarketing? (eg: Do you keep remarketing to people in your audience for 60 days? or just 30 days, or even 7 days? and what's the cap on the number of impressions you show to people per day, is it 100 impressions or just 20? etc.). If you had only a *fixed* budget of $100 for remarketing, you could grow the number of conversions even if your traffic increased by 10x. How? you could simply be more picky. People are *far* less likely to convert as time goes on (are you still in the market for that thing you were looking to buy 60-days ago? probably not). So, as your traffic increases by 10x, i'd reduce the audience membership duration by 10x. So, I'd be spending the same dollar amount on remarketing, but yielding a much higher conversion rate due to focusing the remarketing ads on targeting only the most recent visitors.

An alternative solution would be to set a target cost per action and try to just optimize for the greatest number of conversions at or below a specified target CPA. In this case, the budget will be almost entirely dictated by the target CPA that you set as opposed to the traffic to your site. Generally, you'll find that the lower you set your target CPA, the fewer you'll be able to get, and vice versa.

So, to answer your question here - all things left the same (no change in audience definition criterion, etc.), your remarketing budget should scale linearly as your traffic grows, however there are definitely ways to change your bidding strategy or your audience definition strategy to be more picky, to squeeze more out of a fixed remarketing budget as the traffic to your site grows.

2) Yes - there was another change that happened in the middle of last year - I mentioned in the article that we made a big change in blogging strategy, which had a huge impact on the "time on site" engagement metric - basically embracing longer form content (more in-depth articles with data and analysis as opposed to just generic best practice platitudes). However, to keep this case study under 3000 words, i didn't include all of that analysis in this article. stay tuned!

We use re-marketing for most of our clients, it is a very clever and powerful tool which generated a very impressive ROI when used properly. The use of re-marketing lists helps to identify which groups of visitors are converting best.

Awesome case study Larry. I really appreciate your transparency. Re-marketing does rock if done well which clearly Wordstream has. Wordstream is a poster child for remarketing. The stats you cited from Forrester

96% of people who visit your site don't convert to a lead or sale. And 70% of people who put stuff in a shopping cart leave without placing an order are very telling.

Have you tried defining a custom audience of users who abandoned an order pages and then do sequential targeting offering them special offers with progressive incentives to entice them to convert? Remarketing is one of the best tools in the online marketers toolbox.

Hi Rick, we were definitely struggling for a pretty long time with the issues described in the post, so thanks for this note. There are many more advanced remarketing strategies that can be employed that i didn't touch on - but i think your idea is pretty cool! thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the post Larry, I am a big believer in branding and we allocate a re-marketing budget to a lot of our ppc accounts. However, I do get a lot of negativity from other "seo's" concerning conversion tracking and the lack of clear ROI when re-marketing is involved. I hadn't tracked branded organic searches as a result of re-marketing, thats a cool indicator.

I do think its important to mention that having the right client or business is a vital component to successful re-marketing campaigns. I've found the client needs to believe in the importance of branding first.

Awesome Post Larry.I think this approach will work for new website as well but the objective will differ in case of new website as here we are looking to build a new brand and the number of groups to be formed for the campaign will be too many.It will also help us in understanding the visitor how they are behaving and lay down the foundation for our future approach as well.

Just with a short amount of time under our belts, we have been experimenting with remarketing for your company site. From my previous experience with it I have struggled with making it work for sites with a lower unique visit number, but for our site now the CPC is not only a fraction of our text ads with highly competitive keywords, but we have seen more conversions from the practice. We are also seeing an increase in impressions and CTR. This time around we are using Adwords to execute the advertising, where as in the past I have used different services.

Obviously this isn't enough background for you to make a decisive determination, but do you think the success with the lower unique visitor count can be attributed to using Adwords and their network being more expansive? This is kind of my assumption but would love to get your thoughts.

thanks Caleb! and thanks for sharing your experiences here. We did some research showing that on average cpc's on google display network are roughly half the average CPC from google search. We also found similar conversion rates between search and remarketing campaigns, and in some cases, remarketing even beat out google search in certain verticals like automotive and travel.

I believe that remarketing can be very beneficial for sites with small audiences. As you mentioned, the google display network is huge (it has over 2 million sites, and apparently facebook is being added to the list soon) so once you tag even just a few people, you can market to them them across a large portion of the internet.

Also, there are a few ways to make that audience bigger, for example:

Increasing the membership duration of your audience to be longer (eg: all visitors in the last 60 days or whatever)

I think you're absolutely right, Larry! I think all online marketers should apply some level of remarketing like you outlined here. Especially with all of the recent updates in SEO, it would be wise to consider such a thing. I also feel some people don't view their web analytic tools right either. Just because you have a jump in new visitors doesn't mean they're interested in visiting your site again and again. You want to create "revolvers," people who will visit the site consistently. That's the ultimate goal of any SEO marketing plan, but if you don't remarket on some level, you'll miss out on bringing in a good following.

If it helps, I just learned today that Bing Webmaster Tools still provides keyword data (and a little more). You should check it out! Obviously Microsoft is capitalizing on what Google took away. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that in there. Thanks again for sharing this!

I don't think I've ever seen a site with such a low amount of branded traffic! Normally it is the exact opposite problem. I am working with a site right now that gets nothing but branded traffic, which is great because people are looking for the company and products by name, but that means they aren't getting in front of people that don't already know about them. I think it's good to have a decent amount of branded traffic because it's a sign the rest of your online and offline marketing is having some kind of effect on your audience and people remember who you are. If they remember your name/brand they might be more willing to convert.

How did your search remarketing campaign fair against your display campaign (split 50/50)? We haven't tried using remarketing lists in search since Google introduced it in the summer, I think remarketing definitely tends to lend itself to display much more than search (since it's all about the branding!).

this is very hard to do because we are doing lead generation not ecommerce transactions that can be instantaneously measured in terms of dollars as soon as someone hits the submit button. That's why i just measured conversion rates.

Hi Larry, a great post with a lot to encourage people to start remarketing.

I do have one question about the decision making process. You say that "only 3% or so of our approximately half a million monthly organic searches were branded searches", but there are still 35,000 or so (not provided) searches unaccounted for. If they were mostly, say 90%, branded you would have had about 13% branded searches. Would that still have lead you to believe that your "SEO had gotten too far ahead of the brand"?

HI Ben - great point. i don't believe that 100% of the (not provided) keywords were entirely branded searches (i think that would be pretty unusual) -- but OK, sure - say brand searches occupied 13% of your total organic searches (i think it's impossible to do this analysis these days - but just assume that you could measure that).

I don't think there's an absolute number where you can say that X% is too high or too low a share of branded searches - the absolute percentage of branded searches isn't so much the issue as the change in that number over time - for me, i just saw that number go lower and lower and lower every month for years, and, *combined* with the other poor engagement metrics (low repeat visitors etc.) led me to make the conclusion that the seo had indeed gotten too far ahead of the brand.

Do you retarget with the goal of micro conversions or social at all? I use FBX as a mix of driving people back to the site for conversions as well as growing my page's fan base. To date, I've only done this for my clients, not my agency, curious if you've experimented with that. Like gated Facebook app retargeting at all?

Often overlooked is YouTube retargeting. A great example is hit the Volusion site, you'll see their pre-roll ad for the next 30 days. Email retargeting - based on an open pixel. Overlooked as well, but at your scale, still a useful practice. Smaller audience, but relevant nonetheless.

Just a friendly tip, if I were you, I'd start to make recency buckets. 30 or 60 days is fine, but you have more than a large enough cookie pool to split that up. 0-3 days, 4-7 days, 8-14, 15-30, 31-60. You'll find that the most recent visits have a higher value (bid higher, higher frequency cap), while the 31-60 may still be worth retargeting, but at a different value.

Ben asked something similar earlier - i don't think there is an absolute recommended percentage for branded vs. unbranded searches - that ratio is going to depend a lot on how mature your brand is, and what your goals and content marketing/SEO objectives are.

I think the key here is that as you are doing your SEO / Content Marketing stuff, to think about how those activities are impacting your brand recall (which can be measured by looking at various proxies, like direct traffic, repeat visitors and other engagement metrics.) -- Ideally, your content marketing/SEO efforts should be *additive* to your brand recall metrics in some small way. If you're finding that no matter how much content you are creating, that the brand metrics never improve over a long period of time, then that might be an indicator that something is not working quite right.

Unfortunately, the branded vs. non-branded keyword analysis seems somewhat impossible to do these days with the absence of organic keyword data due to the whole (not provided) issue.

Great article here Larry. Re-marketing is helping to manage the site and generate the organic traffic. With the help of Google Analytics in building the Remarketing list, we are able to build very targeted ones like people who visited a certain page who came from an organic search. Larry your article is pretty helpful this article solved real problems of traffic.

i've acquired about 2 million links to my site from around 40 thousand domains using the strategy of "big content". Basically i originate new stories that are aligned with big trending news topics which then get picked up in hundreds or even thousands of news sites. i've written about it in some of my posts on moz. recommend that you check those out!

The purpose of re-marketing is to generate more traffic to your websites, and hopefully turn those clicks to follow or to purchase. The content does matter, and it is always to key factor to attract visitors.

I like the approach you have taken in content marketing. It helps us to focus more on content that has a positive impact on conversion rates. I agree that if visitors do not convert then that content is useless.

it's the same process, just different offers and targeting/list segmentation.

Say you're selling daycare services. One example would be to target engaged visitors who live close to your day care center, who spent more than 5 minutes on your site. Then show them ads with offers based on what services they were looking at, such as infant daycare or pre-school day care, etc.

i think FB and GDN remarketing traffic is comparable - you're targeting the same people who you tagged on your website, its just that they're coming from either GDN or FB - so in theory you should get similar performance. I've found that GDN has a slight advantage due to having way more ad formats and targeting parameters than FB, but i'm not surprised at all if you're seeing FB is beating GDN for your business. Google and FB are far and away the #1 and #2 game in town...

My question is a bit of off-topic. But I really need recommendations from you.

I want to know your thoughts about paid press release submission. As we all know that free good link building is almost died and impossible to do. Therefor I am planning to get services from the site like PRWeb did it work for me or not.

We use PR web for press releases. We don't really care about the links from there anymore (we used to though, but I don't think there is any link value any more). We only use PR web as a way of distributing news to Google News. The hope is that people who are using google alerts might have alerts triggered for certain keywords, and they'll see our news. that's all.

And all of this I agree with - but what I'd like as a Digital Marketer is for someone to write up a case study on the specific ways they have tried outreaching a specific piece of content beyond SEO and social. but do you think the success with the lower unique visitor count can be attributed to using Adwords and their network being more expansive?

Hi Manish! Adroll does product remarketing (they call it 'retargeting') - so for example, if you had a catalog of 10,000 products, users would be targeted with specific ads showing the product they looked at, an image, price and description. Google Display Network has a similar feature called "dynamic remarketing"

Retargeter and Fetchback are also great but have less reach than Facebook and Google Display Network. If you're just starting out, i'd suggest using the 2 biggest ones first (Google Display Network and Facebook) then if you needed even more volume, trying out the other networks.

Hey Larry,
I also recently started using re-marketing and found it working for my clients. I was actually able to track them from visitors flow segment in Google Analytics and created many custom combinations in my re-marketing lists for the visitors who I was missing out. Targeted ads focused on them is what I started and i find it working now a lot for my clients business. Actually one can know exactly why the interested visitors are falling out from your business and target them with something innovative options through re-marketing. It is just like an iterative process which give a lot of insight for campaign improvement and ultimately better ROI growth as well.

Knowing that you have so many competitors out there,it's very important to think of unique ways to stand out from the crowd and this article offers a new approach that would help us reach our marketing goals.Thanks for sharing these tips.

Hey Larry, you mentioned you segmented your visitors onto different remarketing lists; did you also promote different offers to each segment? For example, the Wordstream product to non-blog segments and new content (whitepapers, case studies, blog posts, etc) to blog segments.

This is really good stuff, Larry. The importance of remarketing is pretty crucial and your blog post shows just how valuable it can be. But here's a question I had while reading this: how can small businesses do this?

Wordstream is a pretty cool brand that's well-known within the industry. What if you're Small Business X that's trying to grow and really establish it's brand. I'm not sure traditional remarketing could be done like you have in this blog post - not to mention the budget - as successfully.

Re-purposing content is sort of the same idea for little to no budget. That'd be my idea or suggestion. What's yours?

Small businesses can absolutely replicate the strategies described in this post! Say your website is new and you have just a small number of people in your audience - then it's critical that you start converting those few people into more engaged fans and advocates so that you can grow your following.

It wouldn't cost a ton of money since the audience is small and the typical click through rate is very low for display ads (somewhere around 0.2%) so you won't have to pay for too many clicks, and the CPC on display ads are typically cheaper than clicks on search ads.

I'd argue that remarketing is even more important for smaller less established brands, since they have a greater need of creating a brand!

Hmm, that's an interesting response. I guess I didn't think about the scale affect considering the initial audience of a startup or new brand/domain wouldn't require the spending of big money. Good point.

Great post! I started out with my company doing PPC, so I know how beneficial remarketing is for a business. We're offering remarketing in conjunction with SEO because we know how great it is for driving repeat customers. I think this YouMoz post is probably one of the most comprehensive examples to what happens when you pair your current content marketing strategies with Remarketing (retargeting). Awesome job! I'm definitely sharing this post on my company's forum for our clients to see.

thanks eric. i think remarketing and content marketing/seo are very complementary strategies. by definition, remarketing requires having an audience to remarket to - it can't work by itself. And non-branded SEO traffic is also by definition less branded since those people knew what they were looking for but didn't know where to find it. Matching the two channels together seems pretty logical and has worked wonders for us.

We found the article to be well written and decided to feature it in this episode. If you woud like to provide any additional comments, you can do that directly at the bottom of the page listed above.

Since this is a Daily Podcast, we will definitely be visiting your blog from time to time to find more great articles to discuss. If you would like to leave us a comment, question or a voicemail, you can do that on the right side of the page.

Again, thank you for the blog post! Without it we might have not had much to talk about! :)

You can subscribe (or let your readers they can) at http://dailyblogcast.net/itunes